The news that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been ousted is neither good news nor bad for the rest of the world, as the fight between the dictator and the Islamist rebels who ended his regime pitted "bad guy versus bad guy," retired U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt told Newsmax on Sunday.
"This is not a Thomas Jefferson moment," Holt explained on Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend." "Nobody's going to have a tear for the Assad regime as this brutal dictatorship after 53 years leaves."
But now, with the Syrian government being overthrown, "Al-Qaida is moving in," said Holt.
"They've made a bunch of nice speeches," Holt said "'We're here to free you. It's all going to be wonderful.' And then they came out and said 'Sharia law will start in days.'"
Meanwhile, the Syrian nation's wealth is being "pilloried out of the banks and we're going into this chaotic hellscape," said Holt.
"This is going to create a vacuum that Israel is going to have to deal with almost immediately because stability is going to be required," he added. "Russia is not going to have much pushback here because they got burned here, too. Iran gets burned here, too. Syria going into a Somalia-type state is not good for anybody."
Project Sentinel President Tony Shaffer, also on Sunday's program, commented that many nations in the Middle East likewise have brutal dictators who could also face pushback as Syria's leader experienced.
"That's why it's important for us to take a step back, assess what our U.S. interests are in the region, and then work through allies," said Shaffer, adding that President-elect Donald Trump has already said that "this is not our fight."
"We need to be working with our regional partners and allies to allow them to do the hard work of bringing stability," Shaffer said. "The biggest danger to stability is ungoverned space. That ungoverned space will metastasize into terrorist organizations like BTS, like ISIS, and that's what we want to work to prevent."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, while visiting an area near the Syrian border, called al-Assad's ouster a "historic day." He also said he's ordered Israeli forces to seize areas in the buffer zone, to bar hostile forces from establishing themselves on his country's border.
Holt said that Netanyahu gets "partial credit," as Israel's success has "created a power vacuum."
But there is a line of conflict forming "all the way up to Ukraine," and "we have destabilization all the way down," said Holt.
"Syria was not on our bingo cards," he added, but "Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ensured that it was going to be."
"Now we have the potential for a much greater war and danger in this region," said Holt. "Israel is going to need our help, our alliance. It's going to have to be well thought through. There's going to have to be a strategy. Could the Ayatollah go away out of this? Yes, there is opportunity in this stuff, but there's a lot of danger too."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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